Multiple Colonizations and Many Routes in the Peopling
of the Americas: Evidence Sheds Light on the First Native American Indians
Debates and ideas about when, from where, and by what route Native American
Indians peopled the Americas are often “resolved” within
generalized models based on an assumption of north to south expansion
processes. Likewise, these generalized models of the peopling of the
Americas assume either single or multi-wave pulses of Native American
Indians entering North America and migrating internally down through
North America or along the Pacific Coast. Recently, however, models
focused on Iberian chipped stone similarities and African or Austronesian
skeletal similarities have introduced additional, “extra-Beringial,”
migration scenarios to the peopling of the Americas debate. As a result,
one way to address these competing models is to reconstruct the pattern
and progression of population growth of the earliest viable and archaeologically
visible populations in the Americas to see which models are supported.
Reconstructing the pattern and progression of the earliest
viable Native American Indian populations into the Americas can be accomplished,
or at least begun, by comparing the geographical distributions and progressions
of archaeological sites with the earliest known accurate and precise
radiometric dates. By comparing the geographical and chronological distributions
of the earliest known archaeological sites, the directions from which
the earliest viable Native American Indian populations came into the
continents and how they expanded can begin to be understood. In Archaeological
Roots of Human Diversity in the New World: A Compilation of Accurate
and Precise Radiocarbon Ages from Earliest Sites, researcher Michael
K. Faught has published the results of such a study.
Abstract
A compilation of 63 stratigraphic situations with
evidence for human presence and two or more radiocarbon ages older
than 10,500 BP has been processed to increase the accuracy and precision
of the estimated ages and to compare their distributions at hemispheric
scale. The compilation was developed to perceive patterns of population
expansion and to plot early sites in their temporal and geographic
order. The use of radiocarbon dates as data, criteria for inclusion
in the compilation, the statistical processing methods used, and effects
of controlling for precision and accuracy are described. The results
indicate three earliest mean ages with great distance from each other
in North and South America by 12,000 BP, slightly later mean ages
in Alaska, and the abrupt occurrence of Fluted and Fishtail Point
sites at the beginning of the Younger Dryas climatic reversal (YD).
One interpretation of these data is that there were different colonizing
groups settling into different parts of the hemisphere in near-contemporaneity.
Another is that Fluted and Fishtail Point sites may represent population
relocations due to YD related ecological disturbances at the shorelines
of those times. Corollary to the conclusions of early population diversity
is the possibility of landfalls of people from areas other than Beringia
in the late Pleistocene.
Based on this evidence there is no immediately apparent “trajectory”
indicating a north-to-south progression of site accumulation as expected
if all initial Native American Indians came through Beringia. Rather,
there are great distances and overlapping calibrated ages between the
earliest sites in the Americas, particularly between early sites in
southern North America (such as the Page/Ladson) and northwestern North
America (the Paisley Cave), and southern South America (i.e., Monte
Verde) and Alaska (i.e., Broken Mammoth). It is possible to explain
these chronologically early yet geographically far apart sites as the
results of earlier Beringian migration “pulses” or “waves”
that haven’t been found or accepted yet. On the other hand, these
data can also imply multiple contemporaneous founding populations in
both North and South America.
This larger debate on the peopling of the Americas
will have to wait to be resolved. For although the data presented in
Faught’s study is intriguing, it only indicates that the earliest
known archaeological sites emanate from different, widely separated
regions including – but not restricted to – Beringia. However,
these data do suggest that there was substantial cultural diversity
in the Americas in the late Pleistocene.
Ultimately, the patterns of early archaeological sites
in the Americas, their overlapping distributions in time, and the possibilities
of their cultural and biological diversity are no longer consistent
with models of a single northeast Asian colonization event across Beringia.
How many waves or pulses, and from where, is still unknown. However,
Faught’s study does lend support to the theory that the first
Native American Indians came from multiple geographic locations during
the late Pleistocene, possibly in several waves or at numerous times.
Faught, Michael K. 2008. Archaeological Roots of Human
Diversity in the New World: A Compilation of Accurate and Precise Radiocarbon
Ages from Earliest Sites. American
Antiquity 73(4):670-698.
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